


number three in henrietta (number one in our hearts)

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Frottage, M/M, Making Out, teenage boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 05:46:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11891286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: “I don’t give a fuck,” Ronan said. He said that sort of thing to Gansey all the time — he said all kinds of shit, actually — because Gansey was generally unshakable in the face of Ronan's shittiness. He must know that Ronan would follow him anywhere. It had been a few days since he’d seen Gansey sleeping, and the line of his mouth now was brittle. Ronan went to poke Gansey in his eye, his fingertip landing on Gansey’s hot eyelid. “I’m going to take a piss, and then I’ll be in my room for the night.”“Okay,” Gansey said in a flat voice.Ronan nudged him. “Come on.”Gansey scowled, moving his torso out of the way of Ronan’s jostling. “If you must know, Ronan, the mood is gone.”“You’re seventeen years old,” Ronan snorted. “The mood is never all that far gone.”“I tire of this conversation,” Gansey said, haughty, and waved a dismissive hand at Ronan, turning back to his desk.





	number three in henrietta (number one in our hearts)

Ronan’s text messages are frequently a one way street. With few exceptions, he tends to read his text messages, but rarely replies in-kind without deeming the exchange sufficiently urgent. If a stranger looked at his text messages with Gansey, they would assume that Gansey was a fanatical stalker, without the contextual knowledge that Ronan was frequently took texts from Gansey as signals to come find him and have whatever conversation Gansey is looking to have.

 _Are you in for the night?_ reads Gansey’s latest text. Ronan frowns down at his phone before letting out a sharp bark of laughter. “Yeah, dick,” he shouts at his own closed bedroom door at Monmouth manufacturing. “You’re clear to jack off.”

There is silence outside of his room.

Ronan gives himself a small rush of amusement picturing Gansey’s face, and goes back to what he was doing before his text from Gansey, which was reading a graphic novel about zombies that Adam had borrowed from the Henrietta library once and Noah had promptly become obsessed with. Ronan was trying to see what all the fuss was about, and so far it was okay, but he certainly wasn’t about to let Noah “send him some links” to “supplementary materials”, which is what Noah had claimed was the natural conclusion of this cultural exchange.

After several minutes passed, though, Ronan paused to wonder if that would stop Gansey in his tracks. Ronan had grown up with two brothers, and all of them close in a age. They were all aware that the others masturbated, could laugh and fuck with each other about it. Gansey only had Helen.

*

“Dick,” Ronan said. “Is it weird to say that I had hoped I would walk in on you with your hand down your pants?”

Gansey flushed from his collar to his hairline. “Ronan, you are a paragon of class, truly.”

But it was true: Ronan, while he had half-suspected this very scene, had been disappointed to enter the main living area of Monmouth to find Gansey at his desk, still in his slacks and polo from school. His body was hunched over, his shoulders an unhappy slope.

That was not the posture of a man who had just had an orgasm.

Ronan pulled up a second chair. “When have you ever let me being a shit ruin your night?” he asked, taking Gansey’s notebook from  his hand and flipping to a random page. The whole thing was aesthetic all the way down.

Gansey grabbed for his journal and Ronan held it just out of reach. He had a generous height advantage on Gansey, and he wasn’t trying all that hard regardless, so it remained in Ronan’s hand. Gansey let out a huff. “I don’t know why you’re so inappropriately interested all of the sudden.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Ronan said. He said that sort of thing to Gansey all the time — he said all kinds of shit, actually — because Gansey was generally unshakable in the face of Ronan shittiness. He must know that Ronan would follow him anywhere. It had been a few days since he’d seen Gansey sleeping, and the line of his mouth now was brittle. Ronan went to poke Gansey in his eye, his fingertip landing on Gansey’s hot eyelid. “I’m going to take a piss, and then I’ll be in my room for the night.”

“Okay,” Gansey said in a flat voice.

Ronan nudged him. “Come on.”

Gansey scowled, moving his torso out of the way of Ronan’s jostling. “If you must know, Ronan, the mood is gone.”

“You’re seventeen years old,” Ronan snorted. “The mood is never all that far gone.”

“I tire of this conversation,” Gansey said, haughty, and waved a dismissive hand at Ronan, turning back to his desk.

Whatever cognitive delivery service was responsible for gifting Ronan with terrible ideas chose that moment to present him with one, and Ronan signed for it out of sheer habit. “Okay,” Ronan said, getting up. He hesitated behind Gansey.

“Can I help you with anything else, Lynch?” Gansey bit out, and his testiness sealed it.

“No,” Ronan said, leaning down to put his lips against Gansey’s neck from behind him. “But maybe I can help you?”

Gansey’s neck shuddered against Ronan’s mouth, tendon and muscle jumping with a sudden gasp. Ronan didn’t think that sounded like the lead-in to a _no thanks._

Ronan let both hands rest on Gansey’s shoulders and drew back a crucial few inches, just enough to let him think for a minute, a quiet space into which Gansey could say, _Ronan, no._ Gansey did not say _Ronan, no._

Instead, Gansey twisted his chair to bring them into alignment, searching Ronan’s face accusingly. Ronan took care to scrub any hint of malice from his face, not leering or smirking at his friend. Gansey looked flushed, embarrassed, boyish: all the ways Ronan liked him best.

Gansey did not insult Ronan by asking him if he’s sure, because Ronan does not do things he does not want to do. When Ronan leaned in to kiss him, Gansey tasted like exhaustion, stale and stiff, and melted into something softer when he curled his hands into Ronan’s collar and Ronan did not rebuff him.

Gasney’s mouth was chapped and warm, and Ronan pulled him to his feet while he unfurled from his crouch, both of them standing suddenly, and let him cling. Kissing him was a bit of a marvel, and Ronan felt at once comforted and overwhelmed. Ronan had thought, once, that his friendship with Gansey had been headed towards this like inevitability, but then his father had died and his grief had crawled into his lap and obscured everything else.

By the time Ronan felt like he was thinking clearly again, Gansey had obviously moved on — drifted past the role of friend who could one day be something more into someone who had taken care of Ronan while he’d taken leave of his senses, and obviously thought of Ronan as an errant child in need of a strong role model now, now. Or, as Ronan had been thinking lately, maybe he’d been completely wrong from the start, his own stupid heart giving every look a double meaning that Gansey hadn’t meant to layer in.

He was, however, currently pliant. So there was still some teenage boy at the heart of him, hungry and heated. Ronan would take what he could get.

It did not take much maneuvering to get Gansey back into his bed, and Ronan steered him over while shoving down his sense of unease, his paranoia that the whole thing would blow up in his face, his own nerves. Gansey had done anything Ronan had needed from him for the last year — what was a little heartbreak between friends?

Ronan kissed him, delirious, and Gansey’s hand found its way to the back of Ronan’s neck, calloused rower’s palm and his fingernails caught on the skin there, making Ronan give a full body shudder, and if all of his skin suddenly had one well-defined goal, and that goal was to be the patch of skin beneath Gansey’s nails. Gansey grinned at him and gave him a second scratch, and then trailed his hand down Ronan’s back, pleasant even though the cotton of Ronan’s shirt, but best when Gansey got to the bottom of it and touched his fingertips to the skin just above his waistband.

Ronan nuzzled in close and closer, kissing him until Gansey was on his back with his shirt rucked up his stomach, hair mussed, and Ronan was poised against him. Even with Ronan’s sweatpants and Gansey’s trousers still on, he could feel that they were both hard.

Ronan rolled his hips, swallowing down a moan at the unbearable friction; his stomach tightened. Gansey arched up beneath him, rasping his name and Ronan almost came in his pants.

Ronan climbed off of Gansey, panicked. Gansey made a little helpless noise and Ronan prayed that when the time came for him to enjoy it, he would remember it well.

“Well,” he said, and tried to keep his voice from doing something humiliating, like quivering or cracking. “Seems like you’re all sorted.”

Gansey blinked at him, still prone in his own bed, one leg splayed at at angle and bent at the knee, and an obvious hard-on in his trousers, and hid his face in the crook of his elbow. Shit, he was _already_ embarrassed, Ronan realized, hating himself. This was exactly why he shouldn’t have — God, the immediate anxiety of seeing a regretful Gansey made Ronan’s breathing go into overtime as he berated himself, standing there in the cavernous echo-chamber of Monmouth’s second story, about how he’d been such a fucking, _fucking_ idiot.

Gansey said something into his own skin that Ronan could not hear, but Ronan wasn’t an idiot. “Sorry,” he said. He didn’t like apologies but he didn’t like seeing Gansey miserable either.

“How — why would you do that to me?” Gansey said, still not looking at him.

Surprise squeezed a bark of laughter out of him, and he sat back down, mechanically. “Relax, G-man, I’m not going to leave you with blue balls,” he said, keeping his voice light. At the pit of him, he was sick with his own misfortune, horrified to exist in this moment.

Gansey shot up with the speed of a struck match. “What the _fuck,_ Ronan,” he demanded. Ronan wished he could enjoy it: he usually loved to see Gansey swear, both for the fact that he loved to see his feathers ruffled and the pure aesthetic of the word coming out of his gorgeous mouth.

Ronan didn’t say anything, because he had apparently said the wrong thing last time. He swallowed.

“I know you’ve been through a lot,” Gansey said, pulling down his own shirt and bringing a hand through his hair. His mouth was a glorious bitten mess, and Ronan would have traded his inheritance to get back into the circle of his arms. “But you can’t just—”

Ronan was suddenly furious. “That’s rich,” he barked, thinking Gansey was going to admonish him for coming onto him when he hadn’t told him no beforehand, but Gansey hadn’t stopped talking when Ronan interrupted, had finished: “play with me like that.”

They both stared at each other.

“What?” Ronan said.

“You heard me,” Gansey scowled. “You know that I lo— that I care about you, and you just. Used that. Like a joke. Well, I didn’t think it was funny. You’re not usually _cruel._ ”

“You think I climbed into your bed to fuck with you?” Ronan demanded, shock and outrage distracting him momentarily from the most salient detail.

“Didn’t you? You hopped out with a laugh after I got into it.” Oh. _Oh._ Ronan did not even have time to process it before Gansey flopped down, his face landing deep in his pillow. The next words were filtered through several inches cotton and goosedown: “you should go.”

“Well. That’s just conjecture.”

“Am I missing any information?” Gansey said, still dulled through the sound barrier. Clearly he wanted to be done with Ronan, to send him to bed like a misbehaving adolescent, but being called out for jumping to conclusions was his kryptonite.

“Yes, you dumb fuck,” Ronan said, and curled up behind Gansey, rubbing his face at the nape of his neck and letting his hand seek out Gansey’s stomach under his shirt. Gansey could not have been more obvious as the predictable rhythm of his breath completely halted. “The part where I also, you know. Want you, and jumped out of bed because I was going to come in my pants.”

Gansey did not throw an elbow backwards, which would have been easy, so Ronan used his fingertips to stroke from Gansey’s waistband to his navel and back. Gansey’s body shuddered and Ronan thrilled.

Gansey turned in place, twisting his shirt in a way that looked uncomfortable but remaining on the inside of Ronan’s wingspan. He put his face against Ronan’s collar and Ronan let him hide there, tracing circles on his back.

“Okay,” Gansey said, still avoiding Ronan’s gaze completely by virtue of their position. “Let’s get it straight.”

“I’m not,” Ronan interrupted, laughing.

“Dumb,” Gansey grumbled, but Ronan could tell he was smiling, “a dumb joke, you get a none out of ten for effort.”

Ronan squeezed him against his chest, ignoring Gansey’s little _oof._

“I’m gay,” he said, right into Gansey’s perfect but temporarily mussed hair; it seemed like a good place to put his most important secret.

“I’m… not sure I’d say the same,” Gansey says. “But I like you.”

Ronan was fucking tired of talking. His dick had flagged, but his desire to press himself against Gansey, to be so close to him that they were practically one person, had not.

He leaned away, and Gansey tilted his head back to watch him retreat. This time, when he kissed Gansey, his path was almost glacial, leaning in with his lips pulled together, and landed softly against the crest of Gansey’s cheek. “Okay?” he said.

“Yeah,” Gansey said, and it came out in a half-sob. Relief, Ronan thinks. His heart gave a painful thrash.

“Hey,” Ronan said. Gansey grappled with him until Ronan covered him like a blanket, and he complied, lipping at Gansey’s neck, all the way down. When he reached Gansey’s collar, Gansey shuddered under him, and Ronan filed away the exact location for further study later. “Do you wanna...”

“No,” Gansey said, “I mean… yes, but not all the way?”

“Fucking secret romantic,” Ronan joked, but he was relieved. He hadn’t decided — well, there were a lot of things he was grappling with. “Can I take your pants off?”

Gansey lifted his hips up helpfully. Ronan fumbled with his pants button. He’d never done it from this direction before, from _outside the pants_. By the time he had them both down to their undershirts and boxer briefs, they were both flushed and laughing.

“We’re a mess,” Gansey said, eyes sparkling.

“Come off it,” Ronan said, grinding very deliberately down onto Gansey until he let out a very undignified yelp. “You love things that don’t start right the first time.”

“You did not just compare yourself to my _car,_ ” Gansey huffed.

Ronan treated Gansey’s neck to a long scrape from the stubble on his jaw. “You love us both,” he ventures. “You might even love me more.”

There was a long pause.

“Well. Second place to the Pig is still pretty good.”

Gansey let out a nervous laugh, and Ronan realized he has left out a crucial priority. “Fucking Glendower,” he growled, and kissed Gansey’s stupid mouth, a dragging kiss that Gansey kept laughing into. “Fuck off.”

“Sorry,” Gansey said, still laughing. “You’re up there. Maybe even above Glendower, when he’s being elusive.”

“Can your dead king get you off?” Ronan scoffed.

“Well, he hasn’t yet,” Gansey said, smirking, “but to be fair, neither have you.”

Ronan wedged one of his knees between Gansey’s legs, pressed right up against his clothed erection and put his teeth against Gansey’s shoulder. “I’m getting there.”


End file.
